Penguins in a Duck Blind, Fall 5-1 to Feathered Foe
During the ill-fated 1986-87 season, Penguins coach Bob Berry, exasperated by his team’s maddening inconsistency, famously labelled them “circus performers.”
Up one game, down the next.
If Berry had been peering into a crystal ball he couldn’t have come up with a more apt description of our current vintage of flightless waterfowl. Three nights after authoring arguably their finest performance of the season in a 5-1 stomping of the Kings, we put forth one of our sloppiest and most languid.
The result? An ugly 5-1 bookend loss in the battle of the birds.
Aside from a jack-rabbit start, about the only thing that went right for the black-and-gold came while working on a power-play five minutes into the second period. Cycling to perfection, Rickard Rakell swung into the left circle and fed Bryan Rust to the left of the Ducks’ net. Rusty in turn slipped a beautiful pass through John Gibson’s crease to Michael Bunting, who banged home a back-door goal to trim the Ducks’ lead to 2-1.
However, Rust would pay dearly late in the period when he was mashed into the boards by hit-machine Radko Gudas.